(From top) Paul Wolfowitz, Shaha Riza, Judith Nathan and Rudy Giuliani

Washington, April 16: Embattled World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz’s workplace indiscretions involving his girlfriend Shaha Riza may pale into insignificance if former New York mayor and current Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani is elected US President in 2008.

Giuliani told Barbara Walters in an ABC News interview about a fortnight ago that he would open cabinet meetings to his wife Judith Nathan.

Answering a very specific question on whether his wife would attend meetings of his cabinet, Giuliani replied: “If she wanted to. If they were relevant to something that she was interested in. I mean that would be something that I would be very, very comfortable with.” When Giuliani’s wife was asked about it in the same interview, Nathan, a former nurse, said: “If he (Giuliani) asks me to, yes. And certainly in the areas of healthcare.” In the US, this has been a season of indiscretions involving wives, girlfriends and live-in partners of holders of public office and people in authority.

Even as New Jersey governor Jon Corzine is in hospital recovering from critical injuries in an automobile accident, his state has been rocked by a scandal involving his former girlfriend, who heads a union for state employees.

Corzine is a multi-millionaire former chairman of Goldman Sachs and critics insist there is a conflict of interest between him and Carla Katz, 46, a divorced mother of two, because the governor has the ultimate say in the state’s labour agreements relating to salaries and benefits of government employees.

Corzine gave Katz lavish gifts and cash, but he has declined to disclose those gifts on the ground that they are personal. The two have said their relationship ended six months before Corzine announced his intention to be a candidate for New Jersey governor.

However, details have now been dug up about how a company owned by the governor gave nearly half-a-million dollars in loan to Katz.

At issue is the company’s subsequent decision to write off that loan, which Katz used to buy a $1.1-million condominium in a building where the governor lives.

And during Corzine’s campaign for governor, the support of a union of about 40,000 members for his candidature was announced by Katz herself. But then, New Jersey’s gubernatorial office is not new to such scandals.

In August 2004, Corzine’s predecessor, James McGreevey resigned after revelations about his alleged homosexual advances to a man with little qualifications, whom the governor appointed as the state’s director of homeland security on an annual salary of $110,000.

America’s maze-like homeland security structure, created after the September 11 terrorist attacks, appears to produce a big share of such scandals, presumably because homeland security is less subject to scrutiny amid the paranoid environment in the US caused by fears about terrorism.

After his election to a second term in the White House, Bush nominated Bernard Kerik, New York’s police commissioner during the 2001 terrorist attacks, to be his homeland security secretary. But the White House had to withdraw the nomination after it was revealed, among other scandals, that Kerik had used an apartment near the collapsed World Trade Centre as a love nest.

The apartment was donated by its owner so that police officers working on “ground zero” — the site of the twin towers — could rest somewhere nearby in comfort.

In the US capital itself, investigations are continuing in a case about Stephen Griles, a deputy secretary of the US department of interior, who pleaded guilty last month to lying to a Senate committee about his ties with Jack Abramoff, a powerful Washington lobbyist who is now in jail.

Griles told the committee under oath that he had no special relationship with Abramoff. But in fact, Italia Federici, a girlfriend of Griles and the head of a conservative environmental group, had received money from Abramoff and his clients. She had introduced Griles to Abramoff and acted as a frequent go-between.

The Abramoff scandal last year brought down Ohio Congressman Robert Ney and several of his aides, David Safavian, deputy director of the White House’s office of management and budget and former Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay.